The marching, chanting multitude scared the
daylights out of Haiti’s Pétionville elite, loudly
pouring into the narrow, tony streets of the wealthy
mountain enclave while young men scattered large rocks
and telephone poles across roadways and set aflame cars
and columns of tires.
The tumultuous day forced Haiti’s Provisional
Electoral Council (CEP), six of whose nine members have
now resigned in disgrace or disgust, to indefinitely
cancel the third round of widely denounced elections,
which had been scheduled for Jan. 24.
The Police's Company for Intervention and
Maintenance of Order (CIMO) armored vehicles shadowed
the marchers on side-streets throughout the afternoon,
occasionally engaging them with shots in the air or
teargas, but mostly they put out fires with their water
canon trucks and made a show of force in front of
ministries and embassies the marchers passed.
Despite the CEP’s announcement, the Haitian
masses have continued marching in cities throughout
Haiti on every day since last Friday’s historic march,
emboldened by their victory and calling for the
immediate departure of President Michel Martelly and the
United Nations military occupation troops known as
MINUSTAH. Martelly is constitutionally required to step
down on Feb. 7.
However, the Martelly regime is now planning to
deploy death-squads against the popular uprising and
opposition leaders, according to a source in the Haitian
National Police (PNH).
The government is also spending tens of thousands
of dollars in a bid to buy the allegiance of sectors of
the population during the celebratory days leading up to
Carnaval, which falls this year on Tue., Feb. 9, two
days after Martelly is supposed to resign.
According to a reliable PNH source, on Mon., Jan.
25, a police officer called "Chariot" assigned to the
PNH’s Presidential Guard and Security Unit (USP)
received at the National Palace weapons, four Prado
SUVs, and money to sow trouble in the capital’s largest
slum, Cité Soleil, and the semi-rural suburb north of
the capital, La Plaine.
According to the source, Chariot has the
collaboration in the USP of a former Lavalas activist
named "Yabout," who will be a key actor in the planned
terror.
Chariot also gave two Galil rifles to a
paramilitary thug known as “Noé” (Noah) to murder
anti-Martelly people in La Plaine and Croix des
Bouquets, the police source said.
Chariot himself lives in the area of Papo in the
capital district of Croix des Missions Cross and owns a
nightclub called “Scandale Disco” in the Anba Mapou area
of Croix des Missions.
Among the people to be targeted by Chariot’s
assassins are Rony Colin, the new mayor of Croix des
Bouquets, supposedly elected in the contested polling
under the banner of the Palmis party, and Caleb
Desrameaux, the similarly elected deputy of Tabarre,
from the Vérité (Truth) party. The assassins would try
to make it look like the anti-Martelly opposition was
responsible for the murders, according to the police
source.
On the morning of Tue., Jan. 26 in Croix des
Mission, partisans of Martelly’s Haitian Bald Headed
Party (PHTK) blocked the main artery to the Haiti’s
north, National Highway No. 1, by disabling a
tractor-trailer truck in front of the Damiens bridge.
Until Tue. afternoon, when this report was written, the
truck was still blocking the road and any northbound
traffic.
The PNH reportedly received instructions not to
intervene if PHTK partisans block roads or demonstrate,
our police source said.
According to another anonymous source close to
the PNH, the PHTK has distributed 300 million gourdes
(US $ 51,000) to mobilize support for the Martelly
government in a demonstration scheduled for Jan. 28. The
action was originally planned for Jan. 26 but was called
off at the last minute.
Meanwhile, Guy Philippe, the leader of the
paramilitary “rebel” force which helped overthrow former
president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, has declared
that he and his partisans “will divide the country” and
“are ready for war” against the “anarchists” who
stopped the vote, according to Reuters. A former Haitian
cop and soldier, Philippe is today a Senate candidate in
the now-postponed run-off and a close Martelly ally. He
has been holed up in the picturesque south-western
seaside town of Pestel since 2004, and the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency (DEA) has made two half-hearted
attempts to arrest him in the last decade. Each time,
the accused drug trafficker supposedly could not be
found.
As the battle lines in Haiti draw up, the “Group
of Eight” opposition presidential candidates, who
contest the results which put the PHTK’s Jovenel Moïse
in the lead with 33% of the vote, issued their proposal
on Jan. 24 for the provisional government that would
take over when Martelly steps down. They proposed the
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court be named President
(as dictated by the 1987 Constitution) and choose a
“consensus” prime minister with a cabinet of “no more
than 15 ministers” chosen from Haiti’s “known political
personalities.”
This provisional government would then set in
place a five-member “independent commission of inquiry”
drawn from the leading organizations of the media, human
rights, women, the university, and national election
observers. After reviewing the results of the elections’
violence-and-fraud-plagued first two rounds on Aug. 9
and Oct. 25, the commission of inquiry would then
“recommend to the provisional government of consensus
all the measures deemed useful and susceptible to
reestablish trust.”
The G8 also proposed that the illegally sworn-in
parliamentarians determined by the independent
commission of having won their seats fraudulently would
be “ejected” and the CEP would be reconstituted.
In light of the bloody repression being prepared by the
Martelly regime, the G8's moderate and half-step
recommendations are likely to enrage the masses, who are
chanting “we want revolution” as they march. The last
proposal will surely be found particularly galling: “To
guarantee the protection of the members of the Tet Kale
(Bald Headed) executive against all harassing and
wrongful prosecution.”